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by jshier 740 days ago
They never will, since it's also one of Swift's greatest strengths. What they may, eventually, do is dedicate the resources to minimize the negative aspects of the system while documenting clear ways to mitigate the biggest issues. Unfortunately Apple's dev tools org is chronically under resourced, which means improvements to the inference system and its diagnostics come and go as engineers are allowed to work on it. Occasionally it will improve, only to then regress as more features are added to the language, and then the cycle continues.
2 comments
fooker 740 days ago
>chronically under resourced

This is very true, Apple sees compiler jobs as a cost center.

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tmpz22 740 days ago
I think this is a unfair characterization. Yes Apple's developer ecosystem has a lot of fair complaints, I've personally run into the issues in this article particularly with newer APIs like SwiftData's #Predicate macro. But we just saw two days ago a lot of concerted issues to fix systemic problems like XCode the editor, or with compile times with Explicit Module improvements.

I think you're painting with too heavy a brush. Apple clearly is dedicating resources to long-tail issues. We just saw numerous examples two days ago at WWDC24.

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jshier 740 days ago
No, this is just the typical Apple cycle I alluded too. Improvements are saved up for WWDC, previewed, then regress over the next year as other work is done, only for the process to repeat. They've demonstrated small improvements practically every year, yet the compiler continues to regress in build performance. Notably, the explicit module build system you mentioned regresses my small project's build time by 50% on an M1 Ultra. And even without it, overall build performance regressed 10 - 12% on the same project.
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plorkyeran 740 days ago
Explicit modules make build times worse, not better. Yes, this is the exact opposite of what Apple claims they do, and I am genuinely baffled by the disconnect. Usually Apple's marketing is at least directionally true even if they overstate things, but in this case the project appears to have entirely failed to deliver on what it was supposed to do but it's still being sold as if it succeeded.

On top of that, the big thing we didn't see announced this year was anything at all related to addressing the massive hit to compile times that using macros causes.

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